Procedures for Re-assessment of National Statistics under section 14 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007

  1. This note complements the Statistics Authority’s Principles and Procedures for Assessment[1]. It describes the main principles underlying the Statistics Authority’s re-assessment, under section of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007[2], of those official statistics that have previously been assessed and designated as National Statistics.
  1. The Authority will use its standard criteria of risk and materiality in determining which statistics to re-assess. These are included at the annex to this statement.
  2. Re-assessment may be against all the provisions of the Code of Practice for Official Statistics[3], or may focus on specific practices within the Code. The scope of any particular re-assessment will be discussed with the relevant producer bodies, but the general emphasis of re-assessment will beas follows.
  • Revisiting areas of weakness and concern/risks (primarily requirements) that were flagged up in the first assessment. In particular, re-assessment will be used to evaluate how any changes that were made in order to meet requirements in previous assessments have become established within the statistical production process.
  • Reviewing significant changes to the production and publication arrangements of the statistics since the previous assessment.
  • Exploring in more detail (than was typical of the first assessments) compliance with particular practices for given sets of statistics, for example the methods used to produce the statistics, and issues of comparability of the statistics across all appropriate producer bodies, especially across the four administrations of the UK.
  1. As with the first programme of assessment, we will aim to keep the burden on the producer body as low as possible. Where possible, we will look for the producer body to confirm the extent to which the evidence that it provided to the Authority as part of the first assessment is still valid, and to update it where necessary.

Monitoring and Assessment, February 2013

Annex A

Criteria for prioritising monitoring and assessment work

  1. This annex lists the criteria that the Assessment team will use to determine the priorities for its programme of Monitoring and Assessment work. It amplifies the risk-based approach described in the Principles and Procedures for Assessment.
  1. Materiality will be determined based on the extent to which:
  1. the statistics are used as the basis of economic or social policy making, the importance of those policies in the national context, and the potential impact of making poor decisions because of poor quality, or poorly presented statistics;
  2. the statistics are used in allocating substantial amounts of public resources, or other significant operational decision making by central or local government, or other users;
  3. the statistics are used as part of high profile indicators, or have been used in setting, calibrating or measuring progress against government targets;
  4. the production of the statistics is required by legislation either in the UK or Europe;
  5. the statistics are used in the production of other sets of statistics, for example the use of population statistics as the denominator for other statistical series;
  6. the publication of the statistics typically generates significant media reporting or other public attention; and
  7. the statistics have been the subject of recent Parliamentary scrutiny, for example by the Public Administration Select Committee, other Select Committees or equivalent scrutiny in the devolved administrations or the EU.
  1. Risk will be determined based on the extent to which:
  1. the Statistics Authority is aware of any users' (including ministers' and the media’s) reservations about any aspect of the production of the statistics;
  2. concerns exist about the quality (especially consistency and coherence) of the input data, especially where such data are collected from different bodies, and may not have been compiled in a standard way by them;
  3. changes in the organisation of the production of the statistics, or cuts in expenditure on the statistics have (or could have) impacted on the quality or other aspects of the statistics;
  4. the statistics comprise part of a wider picture of a particular topic, and therefore might be expected to be especially comparable or coherent with related statistics produced by the producer body or other statistical producer bodies, especially within the four UK countries;
  5. the governance arrangements for the production of the statistics may not allow sufficient managerial separation between the staff responsible for official statistics and other staff in the organisation, and the extent to which the statisticians might be exposed to political pressure in relation to the production of the statistics; and
  6. the statistics may be especially open to misuse, abuse, or misinterpretation, by politicians or others.

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